In the nine years from 1975 to 1984, Liverpool won seven league titles and four European Cups. And this was fine.
In the nine years from 1992 to 2001, Manchester United won seven league titles, including three domestic doubles and the treble. And this was fine.
Shortly after this, Arsenal became the first team since the League’s inaugural season to remain undefeated for an entire campaign. This after winning two domestic doubles in the space of five seasons. And again, this was fine.
When I say “this was fine”, I mean as far as the media and the public consensus were concerned. The pundits and experts would simply fawn over how great the players and manager(s) of these sides were.
Even supporters of their rivals, while obviously unhappy with their success, had to grudgingly accept that these dominating teams were simply better than the rest of the competition and were having their time in the sun. No-one felt as though the fabric of the game was damaged or that the heart of football was being ripped out.
Manchester City are currently enjoying a similar period of dominance – six League titles in the last seven seasons – and suddenly it’s a problem. Suddenly, it’s bad for the game. It’s a monopoly. The league’s in danger of becoming boring.
I would therefore argue that the problem isn’t that someone’s having a period of dominance. The problem is that Manchester City are doing it. More accurately, the problem is that someone other than Arsenal, Liverpool or Manchester United are doing it.
The Red Cartel
Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United. The Red Cartel. Members of the old G14. Part of the initial plans for the more influential European clubs to form a breakaway league back in 1998. Over the years, the latter two in particular have gradually wrestled more and more control of the media, to the point where watching Sky when either of them are playing is akin to watching LFC TV or MUTV respectively.
I’m sure readers of this article can cite their own examples of biased coverage over the years so I won’t bore you with my own. All I want to add here is that the only time balanced coverage is provided and post-match reaction is applied fairly is when they’re playing each other.
Just look at Liverpool’s 7-0 victory against Manchester United last year. If Liverpool had beaten anyone else 7-0 (except maybe Arsenal), the reaction would have been all about how wonderful Liverpool are, with no consideration given for their opponents playing and defending exceptionally poorly.
Furthermore, imagine the reaction if Manchester United had lost 7-0 to anybody else (except maybe Arsenal). One only has to look at Luvvie Neville’s unprofessional rant when we beat them 4-0 in 2019. “Everton. Everton!” indeed.
The occasional breach of this cartel seems to be allowed – the media were relatively easy on Blackburn Rovers and Leicester City when they had their moment.
It was too late to stop Chelsea
However, it seems that if any of these upstarts threaten to have lasting success, they must be taken down. There is speculation that it was Chelsea’s emergence as a force in Europe that prompted the creation of the so-called Financial Fair Play rules.
It was already too late to stop Chelsea, and the same year that Chelsea first reached the Champions League Final, the takeover of Manchester City happened. By the time the rules were finalised and became law, City’s extravagant spending had seen them already established as one of the best teams in the land.
Their success could pave the way to self-sufficiency at this level – future sponsorship and commercial deals that they wouldn’t have without the spending that had gone in the past, the income from being Champions League regulars, plus selling players on that they’d already spent big on. It looked like it was too late to stop them too. But that wasn’t going to stop them from trying.
Man City have already had to fight a 2-year European ban in the courts, the case against them thrown out as soon as it went to an actual court, in this case the Court of Arbitration for Sport, as opposed to Uefa’s kangaroo equivalent. Upon learning that the ban wasn’t happening, Klopp declared it a “bad day for football”. The remainder of the old Sky Six, along with Burnley and Wolves, clubbed together to write to CAS insisting that the ban be upheld.
Burnley and Wolves were in the running for a European place at the time and presumably felt they could benefit if City were banned – it seemingly not occurring to them that, if they were ever fortunate enough to have wealthy owners themselves, the cartel would be trying to do the same to them. As someone brilliantly observed on here at the time, it’s like they’d been allowed to sit with the cool kids for a day.
I find it absurd that, in a game in which it’s considered unbecoming to ask the referee for an opposing player to be booked, it seems perfectly fine to ask for a fellow club to be docked points or banned from Europe.
The Premier League should really have the word “League” removed because this is not how clubs supposedly in league with each other behave.
Financial Fair Play and the Profitability & Sustainability Rules
There are contributors to this site who are far better equipped than me to dissect the numerous current charges against Man City; instead, I’d like to exhaust arguments for the Financial Fair Play and Profitability & Sustainability rules…
1) It will stop clubs going into administration
Since these rules have come in, Bury have been liquidated. Bolton were a few weeks away from the same fate, and at the time there were around half a dozen other clubs in the Football League teetering on bankruptcy. So, if FFP is designed to prevent this from happening, it’s failing miserably.
2) It will punish clubs who spend recklessly
Frankly, I think the consequences of doing this are punishment enough. Look no further than the mess we’ve been in for the past few years. Clubs who do this end up with a disjointed squad and players they can’t offload because no-one else will be silly enough to match the wages they’re currently on.
If anything, fining or deducting points from clubs who do this will increase the risk of them breaching the rules again, or force them to sell players to offset the fine or lost prize money from points deductions, creating a vicious circle for them.
3) It stops the monopoly of the richest clubs winning all the time
This is how this piece began. [That must feel like a long time ago to anyone still reading this!] In addition to the earlier dominance of Liverpool and then Manchester United, elsewhere, these rules will only strengthen the hold that other members of the G14, such as Bayern Munich and PSG, have on their respective leagues, and the game will become boring.
And domestically, if these rules had been in place when the breakaway to form the Premier League happened, only Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool would have won it.
That’s apart from the 5,000-to-1 exception of Leicester City, and even since then, they’ve been in administration and had points deducted in the years they’ve been outside of the Premier League, so it’s possible that, had FFP been in place and enforced a few years earlier, they wouldn’t have been able to compete for it either.
Even so, it would be once in the last 32 years that someone outside of the Red Cartel would have won it. How’s that for a monopoly?
And maybe that’s how the powers that be want it. Towards the end of his time as CEO of the Premier League, Richard Scudamore somewhat let the cat out of the bag when he admitted, or even boasted, that it was good for the Premier League’s marketability and income when the more glamourous clubs win it, arguing that more people will tune in if Tiger Woods is on the brink of winning a major than if two much lesser-known golfers were fighting it out.
The reality of Financial Fair Play is that every year, clubs with lower turnovers are forced to sell their prized assets or most promising young players to clubs with higher turnovers in order to satisfy PSR. The reality is that the already rich clubs get richer and more successful, while the poor clubs find themselves even more depleted.
Even those who do manage to have some degree of success aren’t allowed to build on it. The points deductions doled out to Everton and Nottingham Forest have had the desired effect in deterring other clubs from strengthening.
In the last two seasons, Newcastle and Aston Villa respectively have found themselves with Champions League football to offer, maybe for the only time in a generation. Yet instead of being able to take advantage of this by bringing in players who normally wouldn’t be attracted to their clubs, and thus improve further, they’ve had to reign their spending in. Inevitably, this resulted in Newcastle failing to qualify again last season – whether Villa can do it again remains to be seen but it’s doubtful.
In short, Financial Fair Play seems to mean the opposite of its name. It’s like something out of 1984, in which the Ministry of Love doles out punishment, the Ministry of Truth churns out lies and propaganda, etc.
Which leads nicely to the other way they’re trying to keep Manchester City down – turning public opinion against them by controlling the narrative.
He who controls the past
During the build-up to the start of this season, how many times did you read or hear words to the effect of “we can’t have Man City coasting to yet another title”?
Coasting? Arsenal took the race to the final day last season. The previous season, Arsenal led the table for all but the last few weeks. And in the season before that one, Liverpool pushed them to the last day. It’s hardly “coasting”.
But that’s become the narrative. That’s the message the cartel’s chums in the press are getting out there, in order for the public to want them to be heavily penalised – the implication is that the only way Manchester City can be stopped is by being docked points or better still be kicked out of the competition altogether, because their wealth has supposedly given them such an unfair advantage that the rest of the league (and by “the rest of the league”, they mean the Red Cartel) can’t compete.
There’s also been some heavy-handed and out-of-context criticism of their supporters, the media doing their best to paint them as pantomime villains.
City Fans and The Emptihad
On the subject of their fans, the media have also indulged in revisionist history, which really could have come from 1984.
Prior to their takeover, Manchester City’s fans were widely praised for their loyalty and enthusiastic support, given the success of Manchester United during this period. The plaudits were such that they bordered on irritating to fans of other clubs – as our club’s fanzine When Skies Are Grey once put it, you’d think no-one else had ever had to co-exist with more successful city rivals.
The media and public consensus have since done a full 180 – now, City are portrayed and therefore widely perceived as a plastic club with plastic supporters who can’t fill their ground.
Records show that, in the season they were relegated to the third tier, they had a higher average attendance than several Premier League clubs. Even during that season when they were in the third tier, the only club outside the top flight with a higher average attendance were second-tier runaway champions Sunderland, in a big capacity new stadium.
Maybe at some point, the cartel will find a way to expunge these records too. For now, they don’t need to, because it seems the facts don’t matter, only the narrative that’s peddled.
A further example of revisionism
When Sergio Aguero scored that late late winner against QPR, which meant Manchester City took the title from Manchester United at the last, I don’t think there’s a Liverpool fan (or Arsenal fan, for that matter) around who wasn’t celebrating like it was their own team who’d scored it. There was no mention of them being FFP cheats then, or any concerns raised about human rights abuses in Abu Dhabi, or sportswashing etc.
In the years that have followed, City have since been the only thing standing between Liverpool, and more recently Arsenal, and further titles… and now it’s a different story.
We are at war with Manchester City. We have always been at war with Manchester City…
So what does this have to do with Everton?
Well, at the time of our PSR charges and punishments last season, there was some resentment from our fans towards Manchester City. The fact that the powers that be seemed to be fast-tracking our case which contained far fewer allegations of breaches, while all City’s charges were being put to one side, understandably seemed unfair.
There was even a degree of sympathy directed our way from our neighbours. However, it seemed to be from the angle of “what about City?!” rather than outrage that such rules exist and were being applied so heavy-handedly. In other words, any support from them was more about their wanting to see Man City punished than any concern for ourselves.
And that’s why, despite the fact that they’ve now surpassed our nine titles – something I said would never happen back when they were pursuing Joleon Lescott (shows what I know) – I don’t bear any grudge towards Manchester City.
The way I see it, the punishments towards ourselves and Nottingham Forest last season were done to set an example, to show that the authorities would follow through on threats of points deductions, and most crucially to try to set a precedent before the big trial against Manchester City.
And if it could also scare other wealthy clubs out of furthering their ambitions, (and I believe it has, given my earlier comments about Aston Villa and Newcastle Utd), all the better for it. It seems those outside the cartel have to learn and know their place. And sadly, that includes us.
These rules ensure that Manchester City will be the last club to breach the cartel, and they’re now doing their best to consign their recent success to the history books. Re-written or otherwise.
The End
Right, I’m going to take my tin foil hat off now and enjoy the return of club football this weekend, and hope Ipswich won’t follow in Luton’s footsteps by getting their first top-flight win a generation against us.